British Muslim Moazzam Begg spent two years in the notorious US Guantanamo Bay jail only to be released without charge.

British Muslim Moazzam Begg spent two years in the notorious US Guantanamo Bay jail only to be released without charge. In Merseyside to give a lecture about the torture he witnessed, he speaks to Greg O’Keeffe

THEY CAME for Moazzam Begg in the dead of night and dragged him from his home at rifle-point.

The panicked, desperate cries of his wife and three young children would be the last time he heard their voices for three years.

His apparent crime? Being a British Muslim who travelled to Afghanistan before the September 11 terror attacks to do charity work at a school in Kabul.

Months before his arrest, Moazzam had moved to the Pakistani city of Islamabad to escape the US bombing of Kabul in the wake of 9/11.

But the Americans had already distributed thousands of leaflets in Islamabad urging locals to earn cash rewards by reporting any suspicious non-Pakistani Muslims who were new in town.

With shackled feet and arms, the Birmingham-raised book shop owner was driven to Kandahar airbase where he was held for six weeks.

He was accused of working with Al-Qaeda and funding a terror camp in Afghanistan, something he has always denied.

“I always admitted sending donations to Muslim causes – nothing to do with terrorism, and it stemmed from this.

“Most of the work I do now is talking about the terrible effects of terrorism and saying that dialogue is the only way forward for Muslims in this country.

“In Kandahar there were some of the most appalling conditions I have ever witnessed,” says Moazzam, in Merseyside to give a free public lecture at Edge Hill University.

“The first thing I was told was that I was the property of the United States of America and I had no rights.

“I was regularly humiliated, stripped and photographed naked. We were handcuffed and they would make us kneel and then knee us to the head and back. Then they’d use a knife to slice our clothes off. They threatened us with guards dogs.

“Then we were forced to shave. They sheared us like cattle. For Muslim men it is important to have a beard but they would force devout men to cut them off.”

His fate was not about to improve. Moazzam was then taken to another camp at Bagram airbase where he would spend almost a year.

It was here that Moazzam, now 39, says he witnessed two other detainees being beaten to death, and was also badly beaten himself.

“There was almost constant interrogation at Bagram,” he claims. “Sometimes they’d be asking me questions in one cell while the sound of a woman screaming came from another.

“They would pull out photographs of my wife and children and say ‘how do you know we haven't got your wife as well?’ or they’d suggest she was being tortured next door.

“They wanted me to confess and I would ask them what they wanted me to admit and they’d just say it didn’t matter. They just said sign a confession and we’ll do the rest.

“I had seen one prisoner beaten to death for trying to escape. Punishments could be for anything, say like talking to another prisoner or failing to comply with an order. You’d be forced to stand on tip toes, hands tied together over your head, with a hood pulled over your face.

“They left one man there like that in the middle of the room for days. Then they came along and saw he was unconscious so they started punching him. That night they beat him on his legs over 100 times and as a result he got blood clots and died. The official autopsy report confirms that.”

A subsequent investigation found the victim, a 22-year-old taxi driver know as Dilawar, was mocked cruelly in the run-up to his death.

The New York Times later published sworn statements to Army investigators, in which soldiers described a female interrogator stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee.

They also told of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators.

Moazzam testified as a witness in cases against the officers involved but although the military policemen who tortured and killed Dilawar were punished, their commanding officer – who later served at Abu Ghraib – was promoted.

No senior officer responsible for what went on at Bagram has been publicly reprimanded or punished.

With his spirits at their lowest ebb, Moazzam was sent to Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in 2003.

On arrival he was given an orange boiler suit and put in a cell which was eight feet by six feet. “I could take no more than three steps in either direction,” he recalls. “It was more psychological at Guantanamo. It was knowing there was no way out. The only good thing for me was that I became stronger mentally and physically.

“Amid the misery there were some decent soldiers and, bizarrely, I’ve spoken to them since I was released.

“Some of them were just kids who signed up for the US national guard – like our TA – and only intended to do a couple of weekends a year. Suddenly they were called up to full service and sent round the world. They didn’t really understand.

“Two years of that dreary monotonous existence went by with only the odd letter from my family, which the Red Cross arranged. Then one day they came up to me and said I wasn’t being charged.”

Thanks in part to the help of his British lawyer Gareth Pierce, Moazzam was finally released in January 2005 along with three other Britons, all from London.

Since his release Moazzam has campaigned in support of Muslim people still detained without charge around the world.

He believes the British government were complicit in his captivity and has an ongoing legal case against them.

Meanwhile, he claims lies about his background are still perpetrated.

Online website Wikipedia has a biography of him, which refers to his 1994 arrest for being part of a Birmingham gang and possession of ‘night vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, and extremist literature.’

Moazzam insists that he never owned such literature and the goggles and flak-jacket were for charity work he carried out in Bosnia and Chechnya, where he helped Muslims.

He says: “My wife gave birth to one of my children while I was detained. But I fought my battle in Guantanamo and want to leave it there and help others.”